Elearning blog: Learning re-imagined

The 5 C's of Social Learning

By John Ambrose

 

In a just published report on leveraging social technologies for learning, Josh Bersin & Associates makes the case that the big win here is putting “we” into learning. By that, they mean that social technologies can help us transform e-learning from a largely solitary virtual classroom experience to a communal journey where users can learn from one another as they progress through the subject matter.

 

The implications of this concept are not trivial. Learners pursuing a common learning outcome – whether a formal one such as an IT certification or an informal one such as brushing up on cultural best practices prior to a trip --  can be now be effortlessly joined together as a virtual, fluid cohort without physical or geographic constraints.  This injects into the e-learning journey the opportunity for the sharing of multiple perspectives and insights, and more importantly creates fertile ground for what I like to call the ‘the serendipity of discovery.’  In other words, e-learning no longer needs to be a one-dimensional experience.

 

These social technologies are here to stay, so the call to action for the learning industry is to determine how and how fast to leverage them for social learning. Bersin’s David Mallon offers a useful framework for assessing the right solutions to match ‘the personality’ of each organization. He calls this the 4C’s:

 

Conversations – Users talking to other users, growing the collective discourse of the community;

 

Connections – Users establishing links to other users, making the social graph a reality;

 

Content – Users creating / discovering / sharing content in ways not previously possible; and,

 

Collaboration – Users working together to accomplish work.

 

This is an excellent starting point for trying to narrow down appropriate social technologies from what has become a dizzying list of tools.

 

But I would offer a fifth “C” -- Cost. And this is not just the price you pay. There are the hard costs of implementation fees, project management fees, licensing fees and maintenance fees. There are also the soft costs of internal resource to define, champion, market, monitor, and assess these social technologies.  There are also the intangible costs of reputation capital if a high profile social launch goes wrong or fails to get the desired traction. And finally, there are the switching costs.  Since many of the existing solutions are offered by start-ups or venture-backed companies in a very fragmented industry, be mindful of the scalability and viability risks associated with under-capitalized companies.   

 

It’s increasingly clear that the value of social technologies is not in the replacement of existing learning modes, but as an accelerant. Bersin & Associates have provided a very useful tool for preparing organizations to make a successful transition from ‘ME learning’ to ‘WE learning.’ 

 

What do you think of these considerations?  How are you thinking about this transition?

Social Is Where Knowledge Goes to Thrive

By John Ambrose

 

In my keynote at the kickoff to SkillSoft’s Perspectives e learning conference, I described one of the key reasons that social technologies are so crucial in this new decade and why they are definitely not a “fad.”

 

Social technologies (like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) provide a platform for collaboration, not merely a channel for collaboration.  The differences are stark.  MIT’s Andrew McAfee distinguishes the two very nicely in his book Enterprise 2.0.  

 

Channels for collaboration have been around for a long time.  The telephone – easy, convenient, personal; the conference call – groups of people talking together as a single synchronous event; email the greatest collaboration tool of the past quarter century; mobile phone texting and IM.  All are channels.

 

The problem with these technologies is that with few exceptions, they essentially keep communication private.  Hence, they are simply channels, or conduits, for the collaboration.  They suffocate the communication that occurs because they are not widely visible, consultable or searchable.  They leave no trace of the collaboration patterns.

 

An alternative to a Channel, is a Platform.  Platforms are collections of digital content where contributions are globally visible (anyone who is part of the community can see them) and persistent (they stick around….can be discovered, searched, or shared).  Access to platforms can be restricted, but the main goal of a platform is to make content permanently and widely available to the community it is serving.

 

That is why social learning will join formal and informal learning as the three key modalities in the next decade.  It has been said that “Email is where knowledge goes to die.”  In the next decade, we should be saying “Social is where knowledge goes to thrive.”

 

What do you think?

 

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Free Download: Successful Enterprise Social Networking

 

SkillSoft has summarized the consensus of opinion and insight from industry analysts on the benefits of implementing enterprise social networking.  Download this SkillSoft Books24x7 AnalystPerspectives report now to learn more.

Who Owns Your Brand?

By Julie Ogilvie

A new report from Accenture on the impact of social media on sales and marketing makes for interesting and provocative reading.  Social CRM:  The New Frontier of Marketing, Sales and Service, is a well-written overview that uses numerous case studies to illustrate how the world of marketing and sales is being transformed through social media.

The basic point is that companies no longer control communication about their products and services.  Our customers are now “co-owners” of our brands, and we need to change the way we market and sell to them.  Gone are the days of simple marketing tactics with a simple linear progression of awareness to consideration to purchase.  Now every communication is a seed in a vast field of social learning interaction. Anyone, anywhere, with access to Twitter or any other social platform, can embroider your message with their own personal perceptions, good or bad.

While this terrifies many marketers, the truth is that this is great news for consumers, as companies will no longer be able to get away with shoddy service and poor quality products.  For SkillSoft, customer focus and satisfaction have been driving forces since the company’s inception.  We’re extremely proud of the results from our annual customer satisfaction and loyalty surveys, and we take feedback from customers very seriously.

We’re relatively new to Facebook and Twitter  and blogging, but we’re already seeing the benefit and more importantly, we’re learning a lot along the way.  Our customers are in a similar period of transition, as they begin to think about social learning (and we’re working hard to help them with new products like inGenius).  

It’s a new territory, and at times it can be disorienting.  But it’s our belief that the benefits of transparency, accountability and collaboration outweigh the negatives, especially for companies that have made customer satisfaction a cornerstone of their strategy. 

What are your measures of brand success in the new social era?  Let me know in the comments!

Sparking the Social Learning Conversation

By Pam Boiros

I have been very pleased with the great comments that have come in, in response to my post this week on the 8 truths of social learning. One reaction came from eLearning guru Tony Karrer.  In an interesting post, he suggested a couple of additional truths:  

•    “Obvious value”
•    “Same tools as your work tools”

Great additions, Tony.  I guess the “Obvious value” was obvious enough to not require explicit inclusion on my original list, but we agree that the community members should be able to see the value for themselves in participating, not just the value to the other members of the community.  As far as the “Same tools as your work tools” – this is a great point.  This has been one of the driving forces behind inGenius, in fact.  Over the last 10+ years we’ve had millions of subscribers using Books24x7 as an everyday, on –the-job performance support and instant e-learning tool so inGenius is a natural extension of the current use case.

Social learning will continue to be a major theme for this blog, so let’s keep the dialogue going.

How Important is Social Learning to Your Organization?

By John Ambrose

How important is social learning to your organization? According to just-released survey data from Hyunkyung Lee, a MASIE Fellow from South Korea, 76.57% of some 781 global organizations are either currently using or planning to use social learning at some point in the future.  

While Mr. Lee doesn’t break down in the split between “planning” and “currently using” in the summary I read, I am encouraged to see that the total number is this high.  Based on the informal polling I have been doing in presentations over the past year, I would estimate that the number would have been below 50% just a year ago.  However, I predict that by this time next year, this same poll would be at or near 100%.

Learning organizations are rapidly becoming more familiar with social media. They are becoming more curious and aware of the potential to amplify learning and knowledge sharing. 

They are also starting to understand differences between the many tools and are starting to realize that the most effective solutions will be content-centric, not technology centric.  What I mean by that is there are already more than 400+ “Enterprise 2.0” technology solutions out there that all share one fatal characteristic: they are enabling technology in search of content.  In fact, in 2010 I believe we will begin to see a growing distinction between “old” generation social tools that exist apart from content and “next” generation social learning tools such as SkillSoft inGenius that spring up from within the content.   But that is an article for another day.

Back to Mr. Lee’s research report.  While 76.57% are considering social media, what about the other 23.43%? 

Well, he lists the four top reasons this shrinking minority is not currently using or planning to use social learning.  Frankly, most of these sound like rationalizations for inertia rather than legitimate business roadblocks. Let me take them in order and offer some suggestions:

#1 More proof of Social Learning's effectiveness is needed.
Suggestion: Social media is not perfect, but it is powerful. It is not a fad, but a new communication channel. Its global impact is being studied at MIT and has been written about extensively in The Harvard Business Review. Proof can be easily and cost-effectively obtained by dipping a toe into the social learning world and analyzing your own results. It also should not require a significant amount of investment. If your vendor is telling you it does, wrong vendor.

#2  No interest in our organization.
Suggestion: Don’t rely on your intuition to draw this assertion. Pose the question on Facebook with those work colleagues who are friended with you.  What?  Not on Facebook?  Maybe that is why you are under-estimating the interest in your organization.

#3  Compliance, legal, privacy, security or other restraints.
Suggestion: If humans focused only on risk, we would never drive a car, sit in an airplane or step into an elevator. I don’t want to diminish the importance of concerns around privacy and security, but it is important to not shield ourselves behind them.  At some point in the 1980s, 23.43% of companies did not embrace email for these same exact reasons. Those companies either embraced it shortly thereafter, or are extinct now.

#4 Not compatible with our organizational culture.
Suggestion:  Your culture is not interested in greater communication, sharing, connections and productivity?  The only legitimate instance I could come up with where social learning would be detrimental to the culture of a large body of people under one roof to -- is in a prison.  And I’m not talking about the guards and staff.  For them, social learning would work great!  

The Learning Professional’s Guide to Social Media, 101

This past year was the defining year for social media.  With 350-million members of its online community, ‘Facebook Nation’ surpassed the population of the USA and if it were a country would sit behind only India and China.  Twitter exploded from relative obscurity to become a favorite sounding board for everyone from Iranian reformers to Ashton Kutcher.  And Linked-in quietly leveraged its vast database of online profiles into one of the most effective recruiting engines of all time.

Yet despite the publicity and the increasing number of prime-time TV references to social media, it is surprising how many people are still confused by, intimidated by, or just in plain old denial about these networks.

So I offer you this mini guide to the Big Three social media sites along with why it is important from a learning professional’s POV (point of view).

Linked-in:  This is the career web 2.0 site. You create a profile, and the magic of the site starts connecting you to just about every colleague you once worked with. Even those whose names you’ve long forgotten.

Why Important?  There are dynamic discussion groups on almost every topic, including excellent groups on every conceivable learning topic. Get free advice, share best practices, find good people to hire. Your HR department is likely paying Linked-in to get access to resume data for recruiting purposes.

Facebook:  The big daddy of social media. This is your friends and family site. You create a profile and start ‘friending’ people you know. This allows you to share pictures, musings, and links with them.  Your kids will be embarrassed that you finally joined, but your friends will chide you with ‘what took you so long’ messages.

Why important?  Facebook blurs the line between professional and personal relationships. Facebook can help you sustain distant relationships with colleagues spread all over the planet who you might see just once or twice per year.  Most people don’t talk shop, and that’s ok. This is a digital replacement for the water cooler.  And since I’ve heard the term ‘water cooler learning’ more than once, why would you not want to imbibe?

Twitter:  New kid on the block. Simple concept.  You can send and receive messages (i.e. ‘tweets’) that can never exceed 140 characters, including spaces.  Roughly the amount of text up to that last period. You can follow whomever you wish. You don’t share personal information.  You share ideas and links.  

Why important? Twitter gave us the ‘activity stream’ concept which is a powerful model for collaboration. The stream is a dynamic list of all comments from those you follow. The user guardrails the content by adding or deleting followers based on what they tweet about. Twitter is also a way to eavesdrop on the world’s conversation.  Want to know what 40-million+ people are saying about your company’s brand, type it in the search box and read the stream.

These short descriptions purposefully underplay the functionality of these sites. But this is only a 101 course. Now that you’ve passed, continue on to 201, which requires that you delve into these sites on your own.  Only by experiencing these sites first hand will you be able to begin visioning how the concepts behind social media might be leveraged for learning in 2010 and beyond. 

By: John Ambrose

Many training organizations I speak with are intrigued by Enterprise 2.0 technologies and their promises for creating a viral collaborative community within the organization.  At last count, there were more than 400 companies out there touting ‘e2.0 technologies’ … everything from wiki and blog products, to products that promise a safe Facebook-like or Twitter-like platform that can be rolled out behind your firewall.

Admittedly, some of these products are quite impressive, but they all share one common thread.  They are all enabling technologies. Just software.

Early efforts with these products are mixed at best.  Many early adopters or experimenters with these technologies report a lack of success in creating a sustainable collaborative environment. 

McKinsey, in a white paper entitled Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work,published in February 2009, observed the same phenomenon and described it this way:

“Perhaps because of the novelty of Web 2.0 initiatives, they’re often considered separate from mainstream work…Thus, using Web 2.0 and participating in online work communities often becomes just another “to do” on an already crowded list of tasks.”

Does this mean that social environments can’t work in the enterprise? Emphatically no.

But I am suggesting that there is a better way. 

There are three ingredients to creating a sustainable collaborative environment:  1) enabling technology; 2) abundance of content; and 3) enthusiastic community. When brought together, these three ingredients can produce a delicious collaborative result.

So the call to action for those learning professionals seeking to leverage collaboration to drive new levels of learning is simple.  Think about starting not with the enabling technology, but with your existing content and your existing active community of users who are already coming to your learning destination.  For instance, if you are currently using a product like Books24x7 from SkillSoft, why not think about the millions of pages of professional reference content that you already license as “seeds of discussion” for a thriving collaborative environment.  

Social collaboration offers great potential to help informal and formal learning, but the most effective path to accomplishing this will be to leverage what’s already working.

By: John Ambrose

What a Birdy Told Me

I have already acknowledged an addiction to Twitter. And, I am happy to write that I have found yet another reason to love the site. Twitter allows me access to events that I cannot attend.

The # sign is a powerful thing in Twitter-ville. It creates a dynamic page with whatever word(s) follow it, allowing people to virtually gather and weigh in on a topic. #sscafe09 gave the world access to SkillSoft’s Cafe held in Orlando in September. By following that event on Twitter (via searching for that ‘phrase,’) I was able to keep up with the news – SkillSoft is poised to launch the SkillSoft Leadership Advantage and showed a sneak peak of upcoming inGenius – and get a feel for what people were discussing: the power of Web 2.0, the value of social networking in a learning environment and the power that collaboration can have on learning.

I was also able to keep up with the CLO Symposium. Imagine that. I’m sitting at my desk in Nashua, NH, and simply typing #CLOsymposium allowed me to be a ‘bird’ on the wall (sorry, I had to) at the event in Colorado.

The best use of this tool is when multiple people at an event tweet about it together – all using the powerful # sign to allow other people to view their collective wisdom about an event or a topic within the event. It might take a while for people to catch on to this – but it’s a great way to bring an event home to your co-workers in real time. Let’s all meet virtually at the next event and give each other a chance to read what a little birdy said.

By: Rachel Levine

Dovetails

 

   

The word “dovetail” creates an image of furniture in my mind.  In the land of furniture, dovetail features mean quality.  Drawers that have dovetail joints are far more durable than staples or glue.  In a metaphorical term, dovetailing creates value in conversation as well as in furniture.  In my maiden posting to this blog, I will take the liberty to dovetail on Julie Ogilvie’s recent blog entry about a conversation.  Conversations can dovetail and create quality as much as furniture joints can create quality.

Julie wrote about Café and conversations and work feeling like an extended family.  She points to the customers that are an extension to our work family.  I am fortunate to work with a group of amazing professional Learning Consultants (LC).  The Learning Consultant team extends the SkillSoft family into our customer base, as Julie shared.  The LCs work with our customers on a daily basis collaborating on business objectives, program planning, marketing and communications and value measurement.  Clients benefit from years of combined experience and consistent best practices through partnership with our Learning Consultants.  As I have conversations each day with my team, they truly personify the extended family that Julie refers to. 

 

When it comes to family, I know I can count on my sister to tell me if my hair is a mess or if I have spinach in my teeth.  As a manager of this team, I can always count on the straight-shooting input from these consultants.  The sibling-like relationships we have across the team make it easy to pick up the phone and get the real story about what is happening across various industries.  They know what is important to customers.  As I ponder blog postings, I know I can count on the expertise of the LC team to share their ideas around those things that matter to me, to SkillSoft and to the extended family of customers. 

 

Dovetailing on Julie’s post is a fine start.  Dovetailing on what is happening across our customer base and in the world of our Learning Consultants creates a strong method that we will all find value in.  In future posts, I will expand on some of those strong joints and partnerships, allowing for learning.  Truly, isn’t that what this is all about?

By: Lori Neblung

Is your LMS Saasy?

Hi, my name is Stephanie Pyle and I’m a SkillPort-aholic.  Obviously I’m a little bit biased, but recently as we have rolled out a brand new user interface  I’m starting to really love this ‘little LMS that could’. 

I completely understand why some companies need to go with much larger systems and we count most of those big players in the LMS space as key partners of ours when it comes to delivering content.  But more and more, I’m talking to people who are looking for something easier to deploy, easier to run and easier for their learners to use.  At our annual Café event last week I ran a breakout session to discuss the future of SkillPort.  Although there were several areas that we want to continue to build out and work on, the feedback from our customers was overwhelmingly positive and those that had already moved to the new SkillPort 7 version loved it.   

One thing that makes me such a huge fan is the Software-as-a-Service or SaaS model for SkillPort.  This takes the burden of managing the system off of our customers and allows them to really focus on the things that make the most impact in their organization.  Josh Bersin recently posted a blog on this topic called “How SaasY is your HR Software Vendor?  What does SaaS mean to you?” where he explains what defines a SaaS vendor.  At SkillSoft, we have been using this model for over 10 years which I think makes us old-pros in an area that may consider new. 

One of the many benefits of our SaaS model is the getting new content loaded into SkillPort.  As a customer gets new content, it is automatically updated on the system which eliminates the need for someone to have to manage and load it.  And at SkillSoft, our model allows customer to always get new versions of the platforms when they want them.  Each version release is made available to all of our customers, but they get to choose the best time for their upgrade. 

Over the next few weeks, I plan to discuss other key areas that make me such a SkillPort fan.  With a philosophy that you shouldn’t have to train people on how to use their training system, SkillPort is usually worth a look and often fits the bill. 

By: Stephanie Pyle